Animation Framework: wxWidgets vs. Qt vs. Clutter

[Hector]

I'm a long time user of wxWidgets, and I never regretted my choice.

But the other day, I literally drooled on myself when I looked at the
Qt demo:

http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2007/04/11/qt-demo/

Effects everywhere: animations, bouncing, semi-transparent windows,
fade-in, openGL drawing for GPU harware acceleration, etc...

I may be wrong, but I don't think those things could easily be done
(or done at all) with wxWidgets.

I know it may seem gimmicky, but nowadays users are expecting a
minimum of eye candy from a modern app.

So, have I missed something and it's already feasible with wxWidgets ?

Or will it be in the future, like with wxWidgets 3.0 ?


Last but not least, I've tried the clutter toolkit, and it's exellent:

http://www.clutter-project.org/about

It's an openGL animation framework, but without the hurdle of openGL
programming.

It can be embedded into SDL, Qt, GTK, etc... but apparently not into
wxWidgets.

http://www.clutter-project.org/about/integration-libraries

So once again, am I missing something ?

Or is it something that could be done easily enough (I'm ok to pay
someone to do it) ?

[Vadim Zeitlin]

On Mon, 25 Oct 2010 04:27:54 -0700 (PDT) Hector <Hec...@coollector.com> wrote:

H> Effects everywhere: animations, bouncing, semi-transparent windows,
H> fade-in, openGL drawing for GPU harware acceleration, etc...
H>
H> I may be wrong, but I don't think those things could easily be done
H> (or done at all) with wxWidgets.

No, you are not wrong. We wrap some of the functionality of the underlying
platform with wxAnimationCtrl and wxWindow::ShowWithEffect() but that's
about all. We don't have any higher level/easier to use classes for
animation.

H> Or will it be in the future, like with wxWidgets 3.0 ?

It's not planned currently and while I know that Stefan is very interested
in this I don't think we'll have anything really impressive unless someone
contributes it.

H> Last but not least, I've tried the clutter toolkit, and it's exellent:
H>
H> http://www.clutter-project.org/about
H>
H> It's an openGL animation framework, but without the hurdle of openGL
H> programming.
H>
H> It can be embedded into SDL, Qt, GTK, etc... but apparently not into
H> wxWidgets.
H>
H> http://www.clutter-project.org/about/integration-libraries
H>
H> So once again, am I missing something ?

Enabling Clutter in wx should be possible and might indeed be the most
promising way to get advanced animation support into wx. But AFAIK nobody
is working on this yet. OTOH Clutter is quite a young project itself.

Regards,
VZ

--
TT-Solutions: wxWidgets consultancy and technical support
http://www.tt-solutions.com/

[Steve Barnes]

http://labs.qt.nokia.com/2007/04/11/qt-demo/

http://www.clutter-project.org/about

http://www.clutter-project.org/about/integration-libraries

--
Please read http://www.wxwidgets.org/support/mlhowto.htm before posting.

To unsubscribe, send email to wx-users+u...@googlegroups.com
or visit http://groups.google.com/group/wx-users

Hector,

You might find it well worth while to take a look at the wxPython demo, (you
will need to install wxpython first), it includes a number of python only
extensions to wx that you will find very impressive, e.g. zoombar and
toaster box, the nice thing is that you can wrap C++ and python together
with very good results.

Gadget/Steve

[Hector]

On Oct 25, 5:23 pm, Steve Barnes <GadgetSt...@live.co.uk> wrote:
> Hector,
>
> You might find it well worth while to take a look at the wxPython demo, (you
> will need to install wxpython first), it includes a number of python only
> extensions to wx that you will find very impressive, e.g. zoombar and
> toaster box, the nice thing is that you can wrap C++ and python together
> with very good results.

Steve, thank you very much for your suggestion, but unfortunately I'm
far from impressed by zoombar and toaster box. Those are animations
that I can easily do with wxWidgets, while it's impossible to do with
wxWidgets what Qt or Clutter can do (real transparency, GPU
accelerated, complete animation framework, etc...).

[Hector]

On Oct 25, 2:33 pm, Vadim Zeitlin wrote:
> We wrap some of the functionality of the underlying
> platform with wxAnimationCtrl and wxWindow::ShowWithEffect() but that's
> about all.

wxWindow::ShowWithEffect() seems very interesting. I will install
2.9.1 to test it. Thank you !